SCOOBY APOC­A­LYPSE Re­do­ing The Doo

Writ­ers Keith Gif­fen, JM deMat­teis Artists Howard Porter, dale ea­gle­sham “Mod­ern” and “edgy” aren’t words you would nor­mally use to de­scribe Hanna-Bar­bera car­toons like The Flint­stones, Wacky Races and Scooby-Doo, but that hasn’t stopped DC Comics with its new wave of re­launches, the most at­ten­tion-grab­bing of which is Scooby Apoc­a­lypse.

Fea­tur­ing char­ac­ter re­designs from Jim Lee, this new on­go­ing ti­tle re­casts the Scooby gang as ad­ven­tur­ers in the near fu­ture, where a nan­otech virus is trans­form­ing peo­ple into mon­sters. Each char­ac­ter also has a new back­story, with the most in­ter­est­ing be­ing Shaggy’s trans­for­ma­tion into a mous­ta­chioed hip­ster. Scooby him­self is now an ex­per­i­men­tal cy­ber-en­hanced ca­nine.

These first three is­sues are at their best when play­ing into the silli­ness of the con­cept, and when writ­ers Keith Gif­fen and JM DeMat­teis con­cen­trate on the gags, the off­beat ap­proach comes close to work­ing. Un­for­tu­nately, Scooby Apoc­a­lypse also leans heav­ily on vi­o­lent ac­tion and weirdly out-of-place grim­ness, re­sult­ing in a hap­haz­ard comic that ul­ti­mately doesn’t have any­where near enough of the orig­i­nal car­toon’s daffy slap­stick charm. Saxon Bul­lock

Scooby-Doo’s name came from Frank Si­na­tra singing “doo-be-doo-be-doo” at the end of “Strangers In The Night”.